School of Visual Arts

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SVA Features, 2025

Multidisciplinary artist Kembra Pfahler reflects on her DIY practice and long career shaped by “availabism,” a concept she developed while studying at the School of Visual Arts that embraces using whatever materials are at hand. Known for her boundary-pushing work across performance, music, and visual art, Pfahler has also collaborated widely, including co-curating Future Feminism in 2014, which featured artists such as Laurie Anderson, Kiki Smith, and her former teacher Lorraine O’Grady.

The Hole Johanna Constantine Anohni SVA Kembra Pfahler Laurie Anderson Kiki Smith performance artists the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black performance and music Future Feminism School of Visual Arts CocoRosie

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Observer, 2021

Anni Irish offers an overview of O’Grady’s art practice in consideration of her retrospective, Both/And, focusing on key conceptual stakes, such as the artist’s interest in language as form.

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Boston Globe, 2021

In light of O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Murray Whyte argues for the artist’s embrace of cultural hybridity through an in-depth analysis of her art practice. Specifically, she considers how O’Grady’s insistence to be “both/and” – to contain multiple backgrounds at the same time, refusing a singular identity – could usher in the next generation of interdisciplinary, multicultural artists.

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Wellesley Magazine, 2017

April Austin offers a detailed genealogy of O’Grady’s art career – specifically emphasizing the formative years spent at her alma mater, Wellesley College – on the occasion of O’Grady donating her archive to the College’s library.

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